If you believe there are"gears turning" in thatmind of yours, you arestuck with the wronghabits of thought.Sorry about that.

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You already know that the Machine Age—and its parting shot the Space Age—is over. It's time to get focused on life.

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We have a generation that is growing up for whom the traditional goals of going to the moon, of flying to faraway stars, don’t exist anymore. That’s not what excites them. What excites them is data, networks, social systems, and all of those things that were really not part of the thinking. (A. Barbabasi)

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Here's the problem. The old Mars goal is gone, but its 300-year-old "STEM" curriculum plods on, relentlessly drilling you in what it means to be dead. If that's not what you want, you need to switch over to that data, embrace those networks and social systems, and, by the way, redouble your attention to great literature of all kinds. And do it early in your schooling. You have a choice your parents never had. A whole alternative curriculum path now awaits you on the internet. We'll show you the way, but you have to take it. Most of your classmates won't.

Numbers and equations have no idea how to deal with the complexities of life, but our neurons do.

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This is what our brain does all day. It takes input ... and synthesizes it into a story that makes sense. source

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Big Data then takes these stories to a whole new level.

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We're increasingly finding data in the wild, and data scientists are ... making it tell its story, and presenting that story to others. source

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None of which holds any surprises for your English teacher. Great works of literature have been taking us into our minds for centuries. Neuroscience and the liberal arts are poised to meet in the middle (of our minds.) It is the great intellectual adventure of our time.

Friends Don't Let Friends ... Get Swept Up Into "The Rush To Calculus"

If you wait until you are done learning what it means to be dead, you will never truly engage what it means to be alive, You will be stuck inside the 300-year-old habits of thought that the STEM curriculum installs:

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One way of characterizing K-12 mathematics education in the second half of the 20th century is that it has been a rush to calculus. source